Book Review: The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America. By George Packer

This is a great book. It reminded me of Underworld by Tom Delillo, a 90’s novel about the decline of America. As it turns out America had years of decline ahead of it in the 90’s, as Packer shows. Like Delillo, he does this by telling the stories of individuals in various walks of life, from a factory worker in Youngstown, Ohio, to a Wall Street banker, to a Washington lobbyist, to a Silicon Valley billionaire, to a small business man in North Carolina, as well as many others. It paints a picture that is so surreal at times that it proves the maxim, ‘reality can be stranger than fiction.’

Along the way, Packer makes the argument that we have arrived at a new uncertain place. The safeguards enacted after the Great Depression have either been removed or are no longer suited to today’s world. Moreover, the 2008 economic crisis didn’t really result in significant reform of the system, suggesting that a deeper crisis may have had its benefits. More than once, reading the book, I was struck by the sense that we are living in interesting times.

Like any great book, the narrative speaks to the reader on several levels. First, there are the details of the lives Packer treats. For example, Tammy Thomas, a Youngstown factory worker, is the daughter of a drug addict, who is raised by her solid great-grandmother, and who herself raises good kids while working a factory job. She quits the job at 40, once her kids are grown, goes back to school, and becomes a community organizer in a deeply depressed Youngstown. As her story is told, Packer talks about the decline of Youngstown, from a thriving blue collar city, to a town with increasing troubles as those blue collar jobs are lost.

You learn about a poor family in Tampa, Florida, and their desperate efforts to keep a roof over their heads and food in their mouths, with little hope of reaching the middle class. And at the other end of the spectrum, you learn about the life of a Wall Street banker, who makes millions by the time he’s 30, seemingly without much effort, and the political idealist, who gets rich as a lobbyist and retires early to write a book about the broken Washington that he benefited from. Taken together, Packer makes the convincing argument of the increasing stratification of the U.S. into the haves and the have-nots.

Anyway, the book is great. The individual stories are compelling, and then taken together they paint a broad and fascinating picture of our country. The reader is left with the notion that we are in new and unprecedented times, that there are problems we’re unsure of how to solve, and that it is unclear what the future holds. In other words, we live in exciting, if troublesome, times.